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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

OpenStack Open Source Cloud Needs To Pick Up The Pace

The OpenStack open source cloud platform is maturing rapidly, as evidenced by the just-concluded OpenStack Conference here in San Francisco. But OpenStack has a few bridges to cross and hurdles to jump before it becomes a real market force.

As I wrote on Thursday in my first thoughts from the OpenStack conference, the OpenStack platform itself isn’t designed to take on either Amazon Web Services or VMware. It’s designed to meet a rising need for an open cloud platform that ensures standardization and intercompatibility across private and public environments and service providers.

Philosophically speaking, that’s laudable. But it understates the importance of service providers to the OpenStack community. No, perhaps OpenStack isn’t designed to take on Amazon Web Services. But when Rackspace, HP and Dell are all deploying their public cloud services on top of OpenStack, then yes, OpenStack is competing with Amazon Web Services. When Piston Cloud or Mirantis helps an enterprise deploy a private cloud, they’re competing with VMware and its vSphere platform.

In short, as Gartner analyst Kyle Hilgendorf put it on Twitter: “OpenStack wants to be the enterprise IaaS…then that means they ARE competing with VMware and AWS…plain and simple.”

And as another Twitter wag put it, saying that OpenStack doesn’t compete with VMware is a bit like saying that Linux doesn’t compete with Windows – Debian and Red Hat do. Technically accurate, but not in a meaningful way.

The other thing that’s standing in OpenStack’s way is simply the maturity of the platform and community, or lack thereof. OpenStack promises openness, but Rackspace Hosting still holds the pursestrings (for now). OpenStack promises a lack of vendor lock-in, but as Hilgendorf pointed out in a blog entry, there’s simply too much complexity in moving between OpenStack clouds and hypervisors to let that go unquestioned.

“Customers will find it difficult to lift and shift from Rackspace to HP or OpenStack Provider X because of the effort involved to learn, train, and deploy their solutions into a new management portal,” Hilgendorf writes.

This lack of maturity is represented in the fact that while OpenStack had customers like eBay and Radio Free Asia on hand to discuss how the platform has helped build or accelerate their core business, it seemed like the majority of the thousand or so attendees were either contributing developers or the curious, in various stages of OpenStack testing. During a panel discussion, a handful of VCs discussed how they fully expect to see the OpenStack market explode, M&A action and all – but it hasn’t happened yet, and their investments in OpenStack-based startups are virtually nonexistent.

I’m reliably informed that OpenStack is the fastest-growing open source movement in history, and I have no doubt that the community is going to move quickly to plug holes in the platform, ease deployment and migration, and generally develop both their technology and business cases.

But in the meanwhile, VMware and Amazon Web Services show no sign of slowing down, and even Citrix CloudStack has the edge of having been a production-ready commercial product before it was turned over to the Apache Foundation and completely open-sourced. The momentum is impressive, but OpenStack still isn’t the standard that the community wants it to be.